A review by mamimitanaka
Black Helicopters by Caitlín R. Kiernan

4.0

Goes hard as fuck. Actually might be better than the first one, I only understood maybe 20% of what the hell was going on here but that's sort of intended, Kiernan is rapid-fire cycling through time and perspective to the point where you're supposed to be as disoriented as the many characters who come and go amidst a worldwide supernatural conspiracy. But it's not only a galaxy brained sci-fi story about a global cosmic chess match spanning entire generations and cycles of history, it is also pervasively obsessed with the mechanics of the universe and how these forces puppeteering and orchestrating everything bend and break the rules; so it's also about chaos theory, about doubling, the existential horror of state power which eclipses and controls even Biblical apocalypse, and about mathematics and Time and the fickle subjectivity of the whole concept. Kiernan is basically serving up a mixed dish of delectable spec-fic ingredients, resulting in a fast-paced postmodern puzzle box full of recontextualized yet affectionately homaged genre tropes and Kiernan's always reliable excellence at sentence crafting, which is stellar throughout, and filled to bursting with references ranging from the mythic to the literary to pop culture. Appropriately for the Lovecraftian undercurrents nothing here is answered directly, piecing together your own conclusions is part of the point. Kinda wish this was a 700 page doorstopper given the amount of modes it plays in and characters and subplots it handles, but there's something impressive on its own about fitting this much into a 200 page volume. Though this series is still ongoing to my knowledge, so maybe if we're lucky Kiernan's all building this to some grand conclusion that could very well end up being our weird sci-fi tome for the ages once the series is finished in bulk.